Conference Paper

Back in 2011 the “Landesamt für Umwelt, Wasserwirtschaft und Gewerbeaufsicht” (LUWG, a state office dealing amongst others with water resources management) of the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate entrusted the companies terrestris and Geomer to build a new Spatial Data Infrastructure based solely on OpenSource components.

The developed solution consists of a solid and secure Java-based backend which utilizes all of the components that make up the OpenSource framework SHOGun: Spring 3, Spring Security & Hibernate to talk to the already existing Oracle Spatial database. The frontend (consisting of management and WebGIS-clients) was built using Ext JS 4, GeoExt 2 an OpenLayers 2.

The backend provides mainly the following functionality: creation & management of WebGIS-clients including group & role-based access to these, creation and management of OGC-services and many more.

The GIS-client provides – amongst the 'usual' navigation, layer control, printing, etc. components – some quite special tools to work with the spatial data in the browser. The user can dynamically style many of the layers, create new ones, can digitize and annotate, share his state of work etc. As the customer furthermore has some specialized external applications that need to talk to the GIS-clients, we also developed an external API that allows to remotely control the webmapping application.

The talk will shortly describe the architecture of the application and will then delve into a demonstration of the client functionality both for the administration GUIs and the sophisticated yet still easy-to-use GIS-client.

As the SDI is still being actively enhanced and adjusted for new client needs, I might also be able to show upcoming features like a responsive OpenLayers 3 / Bootstrap client or the interception and user-rights-based modification of OGC requests against GeoServer.